The Island Begins
by the stargate time traveller
Summary: John Hammond and Benjamin Lockwood, and the teething troubles of Jurassic Park.. and Lockwood's growing frustration with his friend's project.


Disclaimer - I don't own Jurassic Park. I've only just come up with this particular one-shot, so I hope you enjoy.

Please let me know what you think, and thank you for your continued support.

* * *

The Island Begins.

John Hammond felt very much like the Ringmaster in a traditional circus act as he stood outside what would soon become the visiting lodge, or the Visitors Centre, on Isla Nublar. As he silently stood in the background, observing the activity around him as the hired workers from the Costa Rican mainland hacked away at the surrounding forest, while others were working on the construction crews, supervised and ordered around by the architects and the section leaders who were currently pointing around them as they worked to construct the lodge, Hammond had the time he needed to think.

Construction of the park was underway. Already large areas of the island were being repurposed to make them into the various paddocks which would house the animals, with the general infrastructure needed for the rides, the other tourist attractions, being prepared but wouldn't be laid down until the preliminaries were finalised.

_"If only Benjamin was here now,_" Hammond thought to himself, wishing his friend and partner who had helped him realise the dream of the construction of an island where people could see dinosaurs as they had been millions of years ago, brought into this modern era through the use of genetic cloning, but unfortunately Benjamin was busy overseeing operations on Site B.

Hammond grimaced as he thought about the operation there. Though the creation of a stable and viable dinosaur embryo had been made possible thanks to Hammond and Benjamin Lockwood's work, the creation of a park full of animals for people to see was a far different and more serious matter. Not all of the dinosaur DNA taken from the mosquitos trapped in the amber was viable, in fact, much of it had degraded over the millions of years it had been locked away.

The result was an industrial operation where Hammond's geneticists led by Henry Wu were free to conduct their research, and it had already yielded great results, though Hammond wished the reality was as simple as the dream had been.

It had been so simple, he reflected; millions of years ago, dinosaurs would have been bitten by biting insects which had drained the blood before making the fatal mistake of landing on tree branches which were covered in sap, and they, in turn, were covered in the sticky substance before the sap hardened and became amber.

While the idea and the concept behind it may have been the plot of a really strange science-fiction movie, in truth the theory was sound enough, and when he had founded InGen with Benjamin's aid, Hammond had been able to turn the dream into a reality. Once more he thanked his lucky stars the Quagga hide found had inspired this whole thing, since the loss of that animal and the recovery had sparked off debate into cloning extinct, or near extinct animals to repopulate them.

Hammond had to admit the idea of cloning dinosaurs was daunting, but it was happening. Taking a quick look at his Gold Rolex, Hammond saw he had enough time before he himself personally went out to Site B; he might personally hate inspections and believed they slowed everything down, but he did like visiting both the islands InGen had managed to wrangle away from the control of the Costa Rican government to conduct his experiments and to construct the park.

As he studied the lodge being constructed in front of him, Hammond felt mentally exhausted just at the thought of sorting the island out, though he knew he had bags of time before he would need to worry about that kind of thing, though the park was certainly underway.

"Mr Hammond? Sir? Mr Hammond?" A voice that disturbed his concentration and broke through his reverie with the same irritating manner of a gnat made Hammond turn and he mentally sighed when he caught sight of the culprit.

"Yes?" Hammond asked, though when he noticed the worry on the other man's face, he immediately felt the foreboding something had happened, something bad. He had been overjoyed so far with the visit to the island though it was a long way from being completely finished, it had looked so more satisfying than that amphitheatre he'd originally envisioned as the site for Jurassic Park. Until the security systems and the fences were set up, there was no chance of dinosaurs appearing on the island for a long time.

"Sir, it's Mr Lockwood, on Site B. Sir," the man, probably one of the latest in a long line of assistants on this island to help with the admin side though he only hoped it didn't make one unholy mess after another, stuttered.

_Benjamin? What did he want?_

Hammond nodded and walked towards the prefabricated base of operations for the whole island. The moment he arrived, he was greeted with a telephone and he snatched it out of the hand of whoever was unlucky and stupid enough to be the one responsible for answering it, and he pressed it against his ear.

"Hello? Benjamin?"

"John, where have you been? I've been trying to get through to the island for the last two hours!"

What? "I don't know, Ben," Hammond replied, making a mental note to check to see what the problem was, but for now he focused on the call. "But what was it you were calling about?"

He already knew this was not going to be good. Lockwood liked getting the facts before breaking any bad news, but when he did his tone became more businesslike, though it varied depending on the occasion.

"John, batch 7-0Alpha has failed."

"What?!" Hammond's voice rose so high it sent a stab of pain through his throat, attracting stares from the rest of the temporary operations centre but he didn't pay them any attention. "How did it fail?"

"I don't know, but the screening process didn't work. The embryos were not viable."

"But those embryos were to be the first major batch now we'd sorted through the last messes where we'd tried to create batches of viable embryos in one go, not get one out of two-hundred," Hammond argued, struggling to contain his temper, "this is the seventh time we haven't had any proper embryos-!"

"I know, John. I'm as angry as you are, but Wu is just as livid. He had really high hopes this batch would succeed."

"What is Wu doing now?"

"I told him to investigate the cause of the failure of the screening process, John," Lockwood answered.

"Not good enough, Ben," Hammond's voice was harsh as he tried to fight down the urge to lose his temper properly, though if he did lose it he wouldn't care about the consequences. He'd had enough of the dinosaurs being grown in large batches, batches the islands needed - Site B for research into dinosaur anatomy and genetic physiology, but also for other fields since the animals would need to have properly trained people to take care of them.

The animals would need experienced feeders who understood the breeds they were assigned to feed and to work with, the vets would need to have a detailed knowledge of dinosaur anatomy so they could screen them for potential ailments, while manuals for the typical behaviour of the dinosaurs would be written up for study by the various keepers.

It had been Lockwood who had pointed out the flaw of that idea since the dinosaurs on Site B were the only ones in existence, they would need to teach other members of their kind behaviour that they had learnt from experience. Dinosaurs were like sheep, really; they followed and copied the behaviour of anyone already there.

"John?" Lockwood's voice when it returned was confused.

"We are losing time and money breeding the different batches Ben, and all we're getting is a load of useless gloop. Henry is currently studying the material left over from the batch, right? He usually does after a failure." Hammond's mind was racing.

"Yes. I take it you wish to have him study what's left?" Lockwood asked rhetorically before carrying on in the same vein, "And not create a new batch?"

"Correct. I don't think it's a good idea to create another batch too quickly, no matter our schedule or the need for new dinosaurs on Site B," Hammond said, his tone final.

On the other end, Lockwood held back the urge to sigh. He had already given the order to Wu to not bother arranging the creation of another batch until the mess here was cleaned up and why the entire lot had died. Unlike his friend and partner, Lockwood was a very cautious man, and if he were honest while he was overjoyed with the prospect of breeding dinosaurs 65 million years after their mass extinction, Lockwood couldn't help but feel he and his friend were moving by too quickly.

He had always likened John Hammond to a tornado; Hammond was always rushing off in tangents, he was always coming up with schemes for making money, and to do something spectacular instead of taking things slowly and this was a prime example of just how out of hand things were liable to go if allowed to fester.

Lockwood felt his friend should have taken this particular project much more slowly than it had been, but he was thankful John had taken his advice after that test Dilophosaur that had been placed inside a paddock to test the security system at the amphitheatre in San Diego had managed to get loose after the system had failed because it had been installed badly and they had underestimated just how agile the dinosaur was. Three people had been killed, ripped to pieces though they'd known for a long time the creature was poisonous and spat globs of thick black venom at their prey.

The dinosaur had nearly escaped, and if that had happened it would have disastrous for InGen and their plans to open a fully equipped zoo of prehistoric animals.

The incident had brought out the worst in John Hammond as well. Benjamin was not blind to the fact his friend was an opportunist at heart, prone to losing his patience and wanting things to be rushed. But where Benjamin wanted to take this amazing new technology slowly, and perhaps apply it to organisms in the modern world, and perhaps even to humans in the hopes of growing their knowledge of genetic engineering and transform the science into something less complicated, John was the opposite. He wanted to rush the whole thing, and while the thought of building a zoo for prehistoric animals, he had quickly disagreed with the idea.

The disagreements had been on the cards for a while now, ever since that incident (he wasn't going to call it an accident since the whole mess stank of John's desire for everything to be done at the same time) at San Diego and people had died, though truthfully he had started to go off of the idea of simply putting dinosaurs into a zoo in the first place.

But the last few batches where all of the embryos were either already dead and non-viable to those heading on their way to becoming useless was another sign of his friend's inability to take things slowly. There was no doubt in his mind John was hoping to use this "research" time to find out what was going on, but Lockwood had fears his friend was going to rush things too far. When that happened, tensions would rise, people would go without sleep, nerves would fray as badly as a piece of unravelling thread, and then someone would make a catastrophic mistake which would set them back for a while, months perhaps, though more likely years and John would wonder why it had happened, angrily lashing out without once admitting to anybody he was the one at fault. Lockwood had seen it happen many times before, but he had no intention of that happening again.

"Ben? You still there? Hello?!" Benjamin realised with a start he had been quiet too long, and he brought himself back to the real world.

"Yes, John. I'm still here, just trying to work out how long it would take," Benjamin replied, instantly cursing himself. How long it would take? Why the hell had he just said that?

"What do you mean by that, how long it would take? Benjamin, we need to have a batch now, and we need to have viable animals for the park."

"I know that, John. I know that" Lockwood sighed, "anyway, I need to give orders to Wu and the others to make sure this proceeds properly."

He was just about to end the call when Hammond's next question, so snidely spoken, made his hackles rise. "Ah, you are going to tell Wu to take his time, aren't you?"

"Yes, I was. There's no point denying things, John," Benjamin snapped angrily, tired of this never-ending discussion which had already sparked off more than a thousand different arguments over the years, "we are out of our depth. We are trying to bring back an extinct species, one we know nothing about. Palaeontologists might have written thousands of books and articles about dinosaurs over the years, but they're all about bones, and guesswork. Beyond that, we know nothing about dinosaurs. You're telling Wu and about a hundred extremely brilliant geneticists who have managed to make this possible to work through the problems of breeding dinosaurs and putting them into a park, but it is not going to work because our method is still in its infancy."

Lockwood closed his eyes even as his ear was becoming sweaty from having the receiver pressed against it, and he was starting to wonder if there was anything to be gained from fighting with Hammond on this one. "I'll see about the batch," he decided to say, at last, realising that if he didn't get off of the line, he was going to be here all day. "Goodbye, John," he added with grudging finality.

When he pressed the receiver down, he sighed and his mind concentrated on the myriad of tasks. With a final shake of his head, he walked away.

* * *

A few years later…

John Hammond's face split into a grin under his snowy white beard, the one where people often considered him to be an eccentric Father Christmas as he left the helicopter carrying himself, Drs Grant, Satler, and Malcolm, and finally Donald. He was looking forward to this weekend. It would be where the future of his park would be decided at last.

As he looked around the beautiful countryside, the seemingly perpetual hills covered with plant-life, and he took a deep whiff of the country air, Hammond paused as he thought about the long struggle it had been building this place. He had wanted to construct the park to give people the chance to see real-life dinosaurs, something they could see, and in some cases, touch though Robert Muldoon would definitely say it was a bad idea, and as much as he hated to admit it, he had to agree; many of the dinosaurs were too dangerous.

But he had also built it as part of his contribution to science, he had wanted to have a park where people would pay to see the greatness of the park.

That had been one of the major reasons behind his falling out with Benjamin Lockwood. The other man had wanted to study the dinosaurs at first before the park could be constructed. _After all_, Lockwood had reasoned, _didn't people study tigers and lions before they were locked into zoos so keepers could get an idea of what they were like?_

Hammond had not listened, believing that the animals would be easy to contain. But he had quickly learnt otherwise, but by then it was too late since the dinosaurs had caused many problems.

But what Benjamin had done…. Using the InGen cloning technology like that. Well, he reasoned, he could very well understand why his friend had done it, though Hammond expected there to be trouble in bringing back his daughter.

The sound of the others leaving the helicopter made Hammond turn around to face them and hefting his cane, he headed over to them.

Soon Jurassic Park would be opened for the first time. What could go wrong?

* * *

Until the next time...


End file.
